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Power Grid Insecurities Examined
Joe Barr writes "Chris Gulker has taken a long and careful look at the infrastructure of our power grids and has come to some rather unsettling conclusions." A good read that outlines where the current power grid is at, and suggests some paths for the future that may help avoid future blackouts.
We know the big problems we are facing today are due to Windows worms.
Don't ever plug a critical system into the Internet please. Even if we remove every last Windows system that wouldn't make it safe.
Maybe this is a good thing that we have so many poorly designed Windows systems on the net today. People will learn not to trust the network and be prepaired for worms, viruses and all sorts of madness.
But let's say 20 to 50 years from now there is no Microsoft and the populare operating systems are BSD, Linux, MacOsX and Solarus. Save the day? Nope.
While there is no excusing a sloppy a major product operating system like Windows you will always find systems just as bad or worse.
OS/65, Lunix and a whole batch of operating systems exist that could present a horrific nightmare of problems. They are not powerful they run on low end computers and are made entirly for project systems.
You will always find one such system running someplace at some time for some reason. Not just poorly designed commertal systems or obsolet versions.
You'll have improperly configured Gnu/Linux boxes, Obsolete Solarus boxes, Linux code poorly patched to run on BSD (not the BSD porting team), Any system with the security disabled for admin or user convence, neat hacks and cool projects that aren't ready for prime time, "my sons wifes great aunts dentist says...", "I saw it on Slashdot" (Or the slate or 10 o clock news), "Your firing me? Fools!! They'll rull the day they desided to mess with the BAFH" and Collage student with very populare website desides to post a link on his very populare web forum to your cool website and all you have as a screen saying "/. Error"
I don't actually exist.
I installed SCADA at control centers and yes we build our own network and yes Our techs come in and plug there laptops into that network to do maintenance. It is not secure from outside infection. As for the Windows issue that is also untrue and yes you are wrong.
The author of the original post obviously has some half-knowledge about how things were done a while ago:
They USED to do it that way, although I must amend, that the guy doing the splicing would either hang from his feet from a cable attached to the helicopter, or would actually be suspended by holding onto the rope with his mouth!
Nowadays of course, management has realized that such methods are haphazard to say the least and the splice crews use jetpacks to get to fibre.
Oh the days, back then, running nuclear powre plant control systems on the Sinclair Z-80. Nowadays of course, we use at least PlayStaton II's to take care of them there reactors.
While the above is technically true, there are some aspects that you neglected. E.g. you could also send the "breaker breaker" or "breaker ultimo" command from one of the key protostations upstream or down by the river and use that to hijack any connection *directly* into SPECTRE's secret lair, located conveniently in the nose of Abraham Lincoln's portrait on Mount Rushmore.
Uuups! I think you're mixing up how things are done down at the nuclear power plant and how things are done in SPECTRE's scret lair. Don't worry, happens to me all the time, too. But say, you talk to much... would you mind sitting down on the chair on top of the trap door in the conference room in ze Zeppelin?